The military will do very well out of Prince Harry’s five-month deployment to Afghanistan. The images of the eternally childlike prince playing Fifa football on a PlayStation in between sitting in the gunner seat of a £35m killing machine will launch a thousand young men off to their army careers office.

‘It’s fun. I enjoy my job,’ he says.

I’ve never killed a human being. I’m lucky. However, someone very close to me has had to in Afghanistan and was given an award for his bravery by Harry’s grandmother the Queen last year. It is not something he talks or boasts about. Taking a human life, someone who may be a father, a husband, a brother is not fun. It hardens people. It haunts their dreams. It’s not something you smirk about and compare to playing computer games. It is something you have to live with forever.

In one Afghanistan-based interview Harry is asked: ‘You are the man with the trigger in your hand. If called upon you will fire? And presumably you have and you will kill the enemy?’

He answers: ‘Yeah, so lots of people have. The squadron’s been out. Everybody here’s fired a certain amount.’

The ‘yeah’ has been interpreted by most of the media, including Metro, as being ‘yes I have killed’.

But it could just as easily be a yes to the two other questions which sandwich the vital one – ‘will you fire?’ and ‘will you kill the enemy if called upon?’

The true ugliness of war is that so many bullets are fired that those fighting may never know if they have killed

Prince Harry suggests playing computer games may have helped him at his duties.

‘It’s a joy for me because I’m one of those people who loves playing PlayStation and Xbox, so with my thumbs I like to think that I’m probably quite useful,’ he adds.

‘You take a life to save a life,’ Harry later adds with a smirk on his face.

‘If there’s people trying to do bad stuff to our guys, then we’ll take them out of the game, I suppose,’ he adds. You suppose?! You’ve taken a human life but you haven’t really thought about it?

A senior Ministry of Defence source was keen to let me know that Captain Wales has not admitted to killing anyone.

‘If I had killed I would not talk about it and neither has he,’ he told me.

The true ugliness of war is that so many bullets are fired that those fighting may never know if they have killed. But Prince Harry appearing to nonchalantly mark off a life with a ‘yeah so lots of people have’ does nothing to win hearts and minds.

Last month, it was reported Prince Harry had killed a Taliban chief with a missile fired from his Apache helicopter while in Afghanistan. The military denied the story. The missile was not fired from the one Prince Harry was in. Despite criticising the media, Captain Wales did nothing to set the record straight.

Whether he has or hasn’t killed, Prince Harry has a lot of growing up to do.

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